Best Free Journaling App Mac

You can create a daily entry in two taps – pick mood and activities. We crunch data and display them in stats, charts, and correlations.

Select your mood

MacJournal 6 is the world's most popular journaling software for the Mac. MacJournal 6 adds a calendar mode that show entries from any journal, geolocation, word count and progress tracking, as. Join millions of Journey users and create a healthier, happier mind. A sanctuary for your mind and soul, Journey will help increase your positive energy, be more grateful and a calmer mind by building healthy thinkings through journaling. We’re more than just a journal, or a diary; we’re your own motivational coach and happiness trainer. Let's embark on a fabulous journey of self.

ALSO: Take a look at these best note taking strategies! With those factors in mind, let’s examine the best note taking app for you to try this year. Notepad by ClickUp. The Notepad by ClickUp is a Chrome extension that you can download and then use across the web. It stays in the bottom corner of your choice, creating a simple way for you. The app isn’t free, though; it costs $3.99 a month or $34.99 a year, so it is really only for serious journalers. This is a significant downside, as many of the other journaling apps in this list are free, or at least have a free option. Outline is a powerful, full featured note-taker for iPad and Mac OS X, perfect for students, teachers, physicians, lawyers, executives and everyone who needs to sketch ideas, organize notes, annotate documents, keep any kind of journals.

Pick the best journal app for Mac from the list below. Many long-time users of the Day One journaling app were surprised by the company’s move to subscription pricing. The app, which helps users keep a daily record of their lives, previously subsisted on one-time fees that thousands of users gladly paid. In researching the best free apps for the Mac, I started by using Apple's category list. This makes it easier to cover the wide variety of content available. If an app is on the Mac App Store, it is in one of the 21 categories that Apple has listed.

Meh or Rad? Daylio has a simple scale that is super simple to use. But you can edit your moods emojis or even add more moods to describe your feelings better.

Select activities and other tags...

Add activities you have been doing during the day. You can also add notes and keep an old school diary.

...and keep track of your life - so simple!

All your entries are safely stored and displayed in list or calendar view. You can browse through them or use a search.

Explore charts based on your entries

From simple mood lines to superior correlation stats. We provide the most advanced stats seen in the mood tracker apps.

See your Year in Pixels

See the full year in one chart. Every dot is a day in your life. Export it as a picture and share it with friends!

Set and measure your goals

Daylio integrates goals into your everyday journaling. You already track your days, so why not set a goal to motivate yourself.

Lock your diary and make it private

Daylio supports locking data on the app level by using PIN lock, fingerprint, or Face ID. Don't worry when an intruder gets your device!

Fully customizable & ready for the night

The power of Daylio lies in its full customization. You can pick your moods and activities. Pick your emojis and icons and even set your color theme.

App
  • Use a big database of beautiful icons for custom activities
  • Mix and match your own moods using funny emojis
  • Explore interesting monthly or yearly statistics created from your logs
  • Deep dive into advanced statistics for every mood, activity or group
  • Customize color themes
  • Enjoy nights with dark mode
  • See your whole year in 'Year in Pixels'
  • Create daily, weekly or monthly goals and motivate yourself
  • Build habits and collect achievements
  • Share statistics with your friends
  • Safely backup and restore your entries to your cloud storage
  • Set reminders and never forget to create a memory
  • Turn on PIN lock and keep your entries safe
  • Export PDF or CSV document to share, print or analyze your entries

If you treat yourself like an ongoing experiment that you want to improve... I’ve been using the app Daylio. It takes five seconds to check.

Successful people regularly evaluate their days. And what is easier then keeping records digital? Thanks to this app you do not have to write a word.

It's incredibly helpful for noticing patterns of behaviour that may be inadvertently impacting your mood. You may notice that any day you don't have a 'good meal' you feel worse...

Out of all of the apps we’ve covered, Daylio’s probably the easiest to use. Just launch the app, select a smiley face that represents your overall mood, and then select the activities you did today.

I love it. Never before have I kept track of my emotions this thoroughly. It has helped me to reflect more and stay in touch with what is going on with me. Being mindful, even if I don't do specific mindfulness exercises. Great app, that got me so hooked that I just had to get the premium features.

As someone diagnosed bipolar over 20 years ago, using this app is a great way to track moods (I too am in to the popular “mindfulness” trend, even before it became popular): it allows me to pause throughout the day, take a few minutes to sit quietly, notice how my body feels, see what kind of feelings my thoughts bring up in me, and then record that snapshot.

This is the first review I’ve ever written for an app but this one deserves a review. I haven’t consistently journaled in years and have kicked myself every day as I continued to not journal. I have been using this for over a month and it is a fantastic investment!

This app is absolutely amazing. It sure has come in handy during quarantine. I seen Daylio as a topic in a reddit bipolar forum. I decided to give it a try and so glad I did. Super simple, yet so satisfying to see the goals you've completed- big or small. I've shared this with my therapist. She is going to test it out and then hopefully recommend to patients.

The best daily mood tracker you will ever use- for real, this time. It records the days you feel the best and tells you what activites you did! For example, I've learned that I feel the best when I work out. When I started doing that more often, my mood increased a bunch! I felt awesome. This even gives you a mood chart and you can do a lot more that I thought you could.

I have a couple of mood disorders and my doctor always makes me take the assesment during my checkup, and I can never remember how my weeks went or what I was feeling. This app helps me keep track of my days, what I've eaten, and keep track of my goals. I had a hard time trying to find an app that was actually helpful and one that I wanted to use, and this one is it. I really like it, and can't wait to see future updates.

At Daylio, we believe in transparency and honesty. Data stored in the app’s private directories is not accessible by any other apps or processes. Your backups are transferred to the Google Drive or iCloud via the secure (encrypted) channels.


The most important thing is that only Daylio app is able to read your entries. We don’t send your data to our servers so we don’t have the access to your entries. Also, any other third-party app can’t read your data.

Try our knowledgebase. We keep it up to date and refresh it daily by our support people.

Daylio is made in 🇪🇺EU
You can contact us anytime at 📬hello@daylio.net

Having access to the best journaling apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac is like equipping yourself for greater success. You can lose a great idea forever due to short-term memory, but not if it’s committed to paper. Keeping a journal is imperative to achieving very efficient IQ, evoking mindfulness, increasing self-confidence, creativity and to improve your comprehension.

Until the introduction of journaling apps for iPhone and iPad, people rely on notebooks to write down their daily goals and ideas. That limited productivity; impeding seamless access to journaling in varied moods and placing barriers between critical ideas and its efficient development.

Journaling Apps for iPhone and iPad

The best journaling apps for iOS provide a coherent world where capacity is a question of availability. There is no form of limitation. From your living space, where you can use journaling apps for Mac, to your commutes where the best journaling apps for iPhone and iPad are paramount, you can always monitor your achievements and create new ideas into your journal entries. However, some of the top journaling apps for iOS have special features that can increase your productivity in unique areas.

The Mac App Store is completely redesigned and features rich editorial content and new tabs for easier app discovery. Source: Apple

Best Journaling Apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac

To make up this list, we considered the unique features of top journaling apps in Apple Store for productivity criteria such as syncing, interface, security and supported files.

1. Day One

Day One is one of the top journaling apps with lots of hype and its living up to it! As an award-winning app with a neat interface, the standard it has set in soft journaling will be rare to beat by any app in that category. The load time is negligible and Day One allows users to create multiple journal entries on the same day, make choice of font, style and security [passcodes]. It has reminders and automatically updates user’s location and weather information. Day One has provision for tags, photos and a searching option. Entries can be exported as PDF (optional) and the app has approximately error-free synching via iCloud between different iOS devices.

Day One Pricing: Free/$34.99 per year for premium features

2. Chronicle

Chronicle is another fully-packed journaling app. It enables users to choose the font style, and sizes just like in iBooks; add an unlimited number of photos in a journal entry and permit multiple journal entries in the same day. Photos can be edited; resize or rotate, entries can be back-dated in case you need to fix it with past dates and be exported in form of PDF or as a plain text file. Chronicle supports keyboard extension with extras, fast search using keywords, optimized scrolling, passcodes and auto-save/undo icon. It supports backup via Dropbox and iCloud syncing.

Chronicle Pricing: $2.99 per month

Chronicle Preview

3. Journey

This journaling app has been dubbed Day One alternative by many, but the app has its own unique features. Journeyworks on virtually all devices and seamlessly supports synching to Google Drive, exports in different formats, password protection and imports of entries from other journaling apps such as Day One. Journey can accept up to 4 videos or images, it has streamlined interface with a negligible load time and a dark mode feature. One shortcoming of this journaling app is lack of reminders in desktops.

Journal Pricing: $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

4. Penzu

App

Penzu is the best journaling app in a blog-like environment. It makes journaling look like blog posts with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for word processing. You can lock different journals with a password, add photos, customize journal covers, add apps and encrypt your journals. It also supports unlimited journaling, synch journals via iCloud and features a search tool.

Best free journaling app mac download

Penzu Pricing: Free/starting from $19.99 per year for premium features

Penzu Preview

5. Grid Diary

The easiest way to get started with keeping a journal is to use Grid Diary. It makes journaling very easy by asking users 8 basic questions daily which are laid out in a grid form. The app features reminders, syncing to Dropbox or iCloud, passcode lock, text formatting and entry export to other apps.

Grid Diary Pricing: Free/ $4.99/month

6. Momento

Posting events in your life on social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter may mean keeping records but Momento journaling app will help you to do more. You can bring all your social media posts together according to their dates and well arranged like a journal using this app and also make new entries or editions to improve the information.

Momento Pricing: Free/ $3.99 for premium features

Momento Preivew

7. Five Minute Journal

Five minute journal is as simple as its name. It makes journaling almost effortless by asking you just a few questions in the morning and evening which requires little time to complete. The tech app supports one photo for an entry and exports to PDF.

Five Minute Journal Pricing: $4.99 per month

8. My Wonderful Days

My Wonderful Days journaling app provides a lot of features. It’s a great app to also monitor your happiness statistics; you can check graphs of your happiness and star special days. It automatically syncs data via iCloud, supports air print, full-text formatting, passcodes, and media addition.

My Wonderful Days Pricing: $9.99 per month

My Wonderful Days Preview

9. MacJournal

Best Free Diary App For Macbook

MacJournal is one of the oldest and most popular journaling apps for iOS devices. The interface is clean and the app has most of the features required for journaling, including bullet/numbering listing. It can also send entries to Facebook and Twitter.

MacJournal Pricing:$1.99 per month

10. Draft 5

Best Free Journaling App Mac Download

Draft 5 is a great journaling environment to capture thoughts and ideas quickly. It enables different writing modes which can be customized. As a simple journaling app, only entries are captured and the interface is quite clean. Draft supports file extension, import, capture via Siri and dictation.

Draft 5 Pricing:$1.99 per month or $19.99 per year

Free Journaling App

Draft-5 Preview

Best Journaling Apps For Ipad

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